Tainted Love
by Serene
Summary: *Completed* Draco and Hermione story about love, hate, and all that is tainted...can it ever be whole?
1. Completely

A/N: Okies, this is pretty dark, although to what extent depends on your definition of darkness

A/N: Okies, this is pretty dark, although to what extent depends on your definition of darkness. But there are adult references, so I wouldn't recommend this for light reading and I'm not sure whether I'm being too lenient with the rating. This is really a bit rubbish to be honest!! I wrote this with Draco and Hermione clearly in mind, although if you want to imagine it as others in the HP books then that could work too. This is pretty weird, it may not all make sense, but that was intended to reflect the character's feelings. It literally just spilled out so the spelling is probably all rubbish. It is very abstract compared to the rest of my stuff, and it is different, so you might hate it, but I don't care as long as you REVIEW and tell me what you think!! Be honest, be harsh as long as you are constructive at the same time. This is an absolute PLEA for reviews, so PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE review me!!!!!

Love to all the wonderful reviewers from my other stories, and to all reviewers! Now I'm going to impulsively post this before I change my mind…

*Serene~

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Tainted Love

Languor. The word fitted him so perfectly; she rolled it over her tongue, tasting every delicious syllable. He lolled on the grassy knoll by the lake and his reflection darted all over the lake and her eyes as at every ripple his face became more distorted. Yet if she looked at his reflection, as if by reflex her eyes became dreamy and unfocused and that was the point at which his features became the sharpest and she could detect any hint of emotion on his seemingly blank face. 

He was so cold it seemed he was carved of ice, and it scared her, she who always had lived in the warmth of her family, of her life…of knowing that she was so much different to him and always would be. It always had given her a slow, guilt-ridden spread of warmth all over her body to know that she was so much better than him…so much different to him. 

Yet his differences that had once served as a repellent stronger than anything she had felt before-loathing, disgust, hatred that coursed through her veins like the strongest kind of anger, or fury, or love. It was madness, the intensity of what she felt for him…fleeting bursts of pleasure to be swiftly replaced by utter loathing, both of him and herself as she mentally chastised herself for loving his face. It was sculpted out of the palest kind of marble, which looked like it never touched anything, and it was made of steel so that he never had to feel anything. And she love-NO. If it was possible to glare at oneself, at that moment she would have unleashed the fury of Medusa's snakes, hissing her name in fury… and then his… because she could never think of anything else because she never did think of anything else because she couldn't ever stop. 

She knew intimately the exquisite torture that junkies felt when getting high because she knew the feeling well…of becoming dizzy, and flying, high about expectations to a place where nothing else was expected of her, or of him. Then their souls could intertwine and twist into contorted shapes that looked grotesque, but in a way that looked so utterly beautiful to her that it was difficult when she came back to reality not to scream in frustration, because it was a fantasy world. She wanted to drink herself into a stupor, but that was for lesser mortals, like him…and oh how she wanted to be a lesser mortal so she could be dirty and filthy and slash her skin to make herself less perfect, just because she wanted to for him and his sake, and because she could, and because she needed him and if that was how she could find him and be a part of him then that was what she would have to do. 

Because as long as she was in this world, and the next…and the next…she could never be separated from him or she would die a fate as bad as a Dementor's Kiss-she would lose her soul, her will to live, even her will to die. She would never want to do anything anymore because he wouldn't be there to sneer at her and make fun at her for all her achievements that meant as little to her as uncarved stone-for his face was carved stone…with little lines…she had memorised every line and crevice on his face and could see it in her mind better than she could her own. But yet it was not enough. 

She needed him, not some contorted image that her disturbed mind could create and picture whenever she missed him too much and started hurting herself. Sometimes she wished that she could at least maintain some element of self-control around him, some sort of wounded dignity for all the pain he had willingly and unknowingly caused her over the years, but she merely crumpled like a wilting daisy and all she could hear was a high-pitched sound that she had never before heard in life, that must somehow come from somewhere higher and better than heaven. All she could see was a blinding light that blinded and binded her to all his faults and yet let her fall so easily into his darkness that was an aura that surrounded him wherever he went like a physical replica of his suffering. 

And she knew he was afraid of her. So, so afraid. Because he knew that she could see right through all the walls he had constructed out of steel, with a steel heart and mind into his real heart. His tainted, black, withered by lack of love, heart. And he knew that she loved him completely.


	2. Dark Angel

A/N: Well, here is the second part to my D/H fic

A/N: Well, here is the second part to my D/H fic. A Draco monologue about his feelings for Hermione. This fic took me much longer to write than the first chapter. The paragraphing is also fixed on this one, the HTML mucked it up on the first one…sorry about that, I can assure you that it annoyed me as much as it annoyed you guys who had to put up with it!! PLEEEEEEEEEASE REVIEW-I will love you forever! I am begging you on hand and knee here people! If I get 8 reviews or more I will upload the next, and probably final chapter. And hey, tell me you hate it and that it is a complicated, over-profound mess if you want, I just want honest, constructive criticism. I do honestly listen to what you say!

Disclaimer: Theirs. All I own is some potato chips and me. Nope, just ate those so all I own is me, myself and I.

Dark Angel

I've never been able to sleep on the nights around the full moon. I leave the brocade velvet curtains in my room open and let the moon cascade through the window in heavenly slivers of clear light. The moon always makes things seem so simple-pure, light and good. But beside the slivers of light my room is also shrouded in a darkness that is made even more evident by the contrasting colours. But the moonlight sometimes reflects and lights up some of the darkness too.

Like she does to me. With her hair shining silver in the moonlight and her eyes resembling an eerie shade of liquid mercury, full of flame she looks so different, so much less restrained than she does in the daytime. That is why the nights are so special to me. I can sit by my window for hours, tracing her reflection on my windowpane, the closest I'll ever get to her. She is my tiny sliver of moonlight that I know will never rightfully be mine in a world that is overflowing at the brim with darkness. And sometimes her reflection reflects light onto me as well, if I stand close to her.

She is sinfully full of grace. That may sound like a paradox, but then so is she. She is more beautiful, more intelligent, more...just more-than I have ever seen before. Her soul overflows with radiance and passion and darkness like my own and light like nothing and noone I have ever known before. But she chooses to hide her personality behind bookishness and to everyone but me she is successful. As I know she sees me, so I see her. To everyone else, it is like we are hiding behind a complicated Illusion, but to each other, we are as clear as sharp white against a dark background. She may seem to take relatively trivial things such as work seriously but beneath that exterior there is dark beauty that shines like a beacon to my heart because I recognise a kindred spirit. We are both contradictions-me with my angelically blonde hair and my black soul and her with her never-ending loyalty to her friends who I know she'd give up in a second to be able to look freely into my eyes without seeing the pain that she feels equally reflected in them. I know she is in pain. I am also in pain, me, Draco Malfoy, born with a charred silver spoon in his mouth. I am in pain because she disturbs me as much as she melts me. Why should a girl, just a girl like her, Muggle-born...all I have been raised to hate and consider inferior, have the power to see my soul, something that noone, not even myself, often glimpses? It is ironic in a wonderfully twisted way.

I scare her. I've known that for a while. I scare her because whenever I'm around her, she loses control. And control is very important to her, her control is her wall, much like my arrogance is mine. Those characteristics are also our downfall, because without them we become human and fallible. Imperfect, blemished by invisible hands that draw stark lines on our faces and weary expressions take up residence on our countenance. I want to be a creature of the light, but I also want to wallow in the deepest pits of darkness. To wallow in the pits of darkness is a wonderfully comforting feeling: like you are surrounded by it and it can heal you because in darkness you don't need a conscience or to feel hope. You are just there and that feeling of being there in the present, with no fears or worries...you could stay there a lifetime. Some people do. To step into the light has always felt, to me, like you are exposing yourself to so much more...a whole world of betrayal and regret over what could have been. Noone can stay in the light always without being burned.

So why do I feel the irresistible urge to run in the light and watch the sunlight play with your hair, dappling it and making it bronze instead of brown? Why do I feel the need to drag you with me, your body limp and yielding because you have no choice but to follow me, into the light where I sometimes get the feeling that we both belong?

Because I think I love you. And for me to admit it is more terrible than enduring seventy Cruciatus curses simultaneously because curses are just a little excruciating pain. It ends eventually. Loving you is a constant ache. Wherever I am I feel the pull of strings on me to be near you, be as near to you as it is physically possible until our bodies fall into disrepair just because we could not tear ourselves away from each other long enough to do anything but cling to each other, falling against a wave of emotion that could drown our willing souls. Because I know we'd be willing as long as we would be together. When I am near to you I have to strongly resist these urges with every fibre of my frayed being. My soul has jagged patches left around the edges from the amount of restraint it takes from me to accomplish this simple task. And I know you have the same patches, because I can see your soul better than I can mine.

I cannot and would not use any endearing terms to you. 'Honey', 'darling', 'sweetie', none sound quite right because neither of us think it is dignified to use those sort of clichés. Or maybe they just don't express our emotions fully enough to be worth the breath. But every day I thank a God that I don't even believe exists that He let you breathe and that I am blessed enough to be able to look at you every day. Fleeting glimpses of an elusive perfection that I know I don't deserve is all I'll ever have of you, like jagged edges of a shattered mirror that I could use to cut your skin to see if you really are flesh like me. Because secretly I think that you are really sent as a test of my self-control because there is no way that you could be real, you are too wonderful. You are the best thing ever to happen to me but I've never even felt the caress of your silky hand on my cheek. And I never will, I know that. That is what happens in idyllic and therefore unrealistic Muggle romance novels, or their music that I secretly love with all my soul because it contains so much passion. I don't know if you love Muggle music too, but whenever I listen to any song, I always find something in it that reminds me of you.

Whenever I do anything I find something in it that reminds me of you.

Do you have any idea how much that scares me? 

When talking to anyone else that would be a rhetorical question but when talking to you I know that the answer is yes. You do know how much it scares me because I see the need to heal my everlasting anguish with your sweet touch, soothing me when I cry out silently and knowing when you need to be near me, otherwise I would come after you and grab you and never let you move away and bond our hands forever together and seal our destinies and fates so that neither of us could ever turn away from the other because we would be two parts of the same person.

We are two parts of the same person. I am a strange combination of darkness and light, and so are you. My dark angel who hides so much anger under your pragmatic and feasible surface. Anger at the world and at injustice. You wish you could make it all better, don't you? You wish you could make me all better.

You never get what you wish for. You never have. Neither have I. But maybe I don't want to be made all better. Maybe all I want to smell your wafting vanilla scent mingling with the strange smell of old books and spices I have never smelt anywhere else. Maybe I just want to look at you and see you as you forever, to show that in my entire life, I never need to do anything more than look into your tarnished soul and meld it together with mine until noone can distinguish two people, only one. You and me becomes more than just you and me, it becomes a single syllable that people run together as if they are used to us being of the same skin.

But that will never happen. Why do I torture myself so? 

Because torture is a most exquisite form of pain that once I have experienced, I never want to let go. Being tortured by you is a strange -combination of spine-tingling breathlessness combined with the innate urge to become flushed red with the warmth that you project to me and that I project to you whenever we see each other, that we project without even thinking about it. Because I know that we both need the others' comfort even if we only give it unconsciously. I think that you need me as much as I need you. But maybe you don't admit it to yourself because if you did that fully, you would cling to me with just as much strength as I use trying not to cling to you. Because you are strong and honest about your feelings and I am weak and dishonest.

Why can I never cling to you? Because, dark angel, you deserve so much more than me. Even if I am all you want, you need so much more than me. You need someone warm, someone surrounded by people who genuinely love them, someone who can wrap you tight in a security blanket. I stand alone against a wind that will eventually make me fall over the edge of a steep ravine and I won't have a blanket to keep me warm, or someone to catch me when I fall. Noone genuinely loves me. Noone even knows me. Apart from you. You might argue that noone knows you, but for you it is a simple question of letting people into your soul, and I know that they will always accept you and all your darkness much more than they will ever accept me. Because I need my darkness to remind me of how good the light can be. And if you took my darkness then I might have to face the light. 

And that prospect scares me even more than my love for you does.


	3. Moonlight

A/N: Well, here's the concluding chapter

A/N: Well, here's the concluding chapter. Hope you like-to recapture the mood that I had while I was writing, I was listening to 'That I would be Good' by Alanis Morrisette, and writing by no light but moonlight of course...I'd love it if you guys could review-it really makes a huge difference to me, and doesn't take up too much of your time.

Disclaimer: Don't own song mentioned above (I wish!), don't own characters (I wouldn't say no to Draco or Sirius though ;-)...) and am in no way affiliated with any cool Harry Potter People especially not Ms Rowling.

Dedication: To all the people who've reviewed previous parts, hey, let me know in your reviews for this chapter if you want me to thank you in my next story-I'll do that gladly! Also for Dee, if you EVER actually read my stories!! :-)

Moonlight

The moon was bright that night. It always was when he was in his darkest moods, and it mocked him with its irony until he wanted to spit at it and draw a curtain against it so that it was out of sight. _Out of sight, out of mind._ That was what he thought was the Muggle saying, and how wrong they were. If he tried to hide from the lure of the moon it only smiled at him and drew him closer as if he were a metallic magnet. He sighed, and climbed out of his bed, frowning at the inexplicable pull it had for him, scowling at the thought that an inanimate object could hold so much attraction for him. For he was free from material temptations, so he had thought. Free from desires that could never be fulfilled. _But then there was her. _Living proof that what he had come to know as law was sinfully wrong. He sighed and opened the door leading to the outside, praying that it wouldn't creak. It didn't.

She sat in her warm bed by the window, not bothering to draw the drapes around herself like the other girls in her room. On this night every month she was overcome by claustophobia if she so much as tried; the red velvet walls closed in on her and she wanted to scream, it terrified her for some reason. 

So she sat, knees drawn up to her chest, idly staring out of the window. On this magical night, once a month those equally cursed and blessed by their lycanthropy roamed free. She knew that most would view this as the ultimate pain, or sacrifice, but not her. She had to cover up her feelings every year, every month, every day, every second because she was so afraid of others. She retreated to the sanctury of books and of dreaming of things that would never, could never be. Became pragmatic and literal on the surface, and soaring to the skies in her heart with her imaginary hero. Although he wasn't so imaginary-he was very real; he would just never be hers, or even a hero. Much less her hero. But underneath he was both and less and more and they ran free from injustice and prejudice in the sunlight of the morning.

She stopped pretending to herself that she was even attempting to sleep, and padded on silent feet out of her room, shutting the door behind her.

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He walked through the grounds, unable to consider anything other than the moon and its effect on the world around him. The air seemed full of invisible spectres, ready to hunt prey or taunt him, running cold invisible fingers through his hair in a mocking caress. Noone had ever touched him as gently as the invisible moon-spectres, yet their touch instilled a chord of fear in him, because along with the invariable softness of their touch there was a chill that he could pretend to ignore, but the eerie feeling haunted him nevertheless. Noone ever touched him like that, and it was likely that noone would ever care enough to touch him like that, or to hold him, in the future. It was pointless to assume otherwise. Even his name instilled fear instantly in anyone who cared to enquire it. Or maybe not even fear, just distain-he wasn't sure what he hated more, the fear or the distain. One was usually just a cover for the other anyway, in his experience.

He reached his favorite spot; under a tree where the moonlight slipped silkily through the leaves and finished in a delicate pattern of light on the grass that was usuallyso plain. He sat, and half-heartedly listened to the sounds around him; a rustle in a nearby tree and strange unnamed animals conversing in tones that were foreign to him. But his real attention was always focused on the moon.

She walked through the grounds, allowing the breeze to brush her hair off her face in a rush of soft air. The world at this time always looked like it was under some sort of spell that she always tried not to analyse as was her general way, because she knew that analysing it would take away some of the beauty for her. Over-analysing things usually did. The moon was a creamy pearl, radiating light to all around it like an ethereal lantern. A shaft of moonlight slowed down on its journey for long enough for her to recognise a familiar figure.

Draco. Sitting under a tree capturing the moonlight like he owned it, although that was ridiculous, one could never catch moonlight to hold it, much less own it, as it took on its own existence late at night. He was sitting there, looking so beautiful and lost that she longed to go over and hold him and reassure him that everything would be alright, that he need not fear, that she was here now...but of course she could never do that. Never. She repeated this as a mantra as invisible magnets drew her closer and closer to him. She struggled with herself, and stopped as she stood, obscured by a tree-trunk, not ten metres from him. He seemed to be thinking, and his usual sneer was replaced by a look of wistful longing, as she was sure her face probabymirrored, although he still couldn't see her. Part of his face was obscured in shadow and part was washed in moonlight.

Her. He could feel it. Smell it almost. There was a human presence that wasn't his own near his, he knew it. And he knew it was her, with senses that he'd never realised that he had. He could feel her trembling and knew that her guard was down as much as his was. He surprised himself. 

'You can come out now, Hermione.' He didn't say it in an irritated tone, and he didn't drawl any syllables, and hardly recognised his own voice.

Hermione trembled as she walked out from behind the tree, trying to look steady and dignified as she came over and sat down next to him. She had the feeling that she wasn't succeeding very well. Why had he not called her 'Granger', as she was so accustomed to hearing. It sounded like a slap every time he said it, but she was used to pain. 'Hermione' sounded like a whispered caress from him, but she didn't let herself think about that. 

'Draco.' That said it all. Out here there were no friends, no enemies and no questions. None were needed, for the tone in their voices rendered them unneeded. Hermione had to restrain herself from saying anything else because she knew that the next words out of her mouth would be 'I love you'. Nothing else would possibly suffice. 

Draco's heart was beating so fast that he could not believe that she couldn't hear it in the silence that followed her entrance. It was not an uncomfortable silence, nor was it a comfortable silence, just a neutral, peaceful and relaxed silence where no words needed to be spoken. Although there were three that were screaming in his head _I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you_; he knew that he had no way of conveying to her how he felt except thorough those words. They seemed to be assaulting the darkness with their volume now, and he was almost amazed that she couldn't hear them. 

Hermione could. She could feel them in the air, radiating around the two in a circle of endless words that she knew would mean so much to both of them, yet she could never have the courage to speak them aloud, for a thousand different reasons that somehow vanished whenever she looked at his eyes bathed in the moonlight.

They turned to each other at exactly the same time. 

'I love you'.

They said the words in perfect unison. 

He smiled, a twitching of the sides of his mouth that looked alien on his features yet warmed both of them up. He knew that he was bathed in moonlight now, but in a while the sun would be coming up. And that they would face it together.

She returned the smile, feeling slightly inadequate towards him, as she was not capable of launching into perfect verse or even prose about how long she had loved him, and how much she had longed for this moment. But in the same moment she knew that there was no need for it. Each of them knew anyway. The sunlight was slowly cutting harshly through the trees, banishing the moonlight and then the moonlight was gone as soon as it had been there. But the magic had not vanished along with the moonlight and the unearthly spell that had been placed on them did not lift. She tried to picture running with him in the sunlight, the light dappling his hair, but somehow it didn't have the same effect as the way they were sitting now, perfectly united in feelings and moonlight and sunlight all at once. 

As their lips melted together at once, she once more tried to think of their sharing sunlight, but it was futile.

They were cursed to love the moonlight. 

(A/N: Hate to spoilt the mood, but at the bottom of the page there is a little box. I don't think I need to tell you what its for, but I will anyway: IT'S FOR REVIEWING!!! Now go review and I'll love you forever!!)


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